Over the past two years, two of the continent's most consequential conflicts have followed a similar arc. African-led mediation architecture established the diplomatic groundwork, only for the negotiating tracks that actually altered events on the ground to be brokered elsewhere. In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the African Union's appointed mediator and a panel of regional facilitators drawn from the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have remained engaged throughout the crisis. Still, the two agreements that have most shaped the conflict's trajectory — a peace accord between Kinshasa and Kigali and a framework agreement between the Congolese government and the M23 rebel movement — were concluded in Washington and Doha, respectively. In the Sahel, the rupture between the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the breakaway Alliance of Sahel States (AES) has left West Africa's oldest regional body managing a security crisis that, by its own admission, it can no longer claim to own.
These developments invite an uncomfortable question for African institutions and their international partners alike: does the principle of "African solutions to African problems" still describe how conflicts on the continent are actually resolved, or has it become an aspiration increasingly overtaken by events? This commentary argues that the principle remains analytically sound and practically necessary, but that its credibility now depends on African institutions confronting, rather than managing around, the financing, coordination, and capability gaps that have allowed external actors to occupy the diplomatic and military space that continental architecture was designed to fill.
A Doctrine Built on Unfinished Foundations
The principle that African states should take primary responsibility for resolving conflicts on the continent is not a new aspiration. It is embedded in the African Union's founding instruments and operationalised through the African Peace and Security Architecture, the institutional framework built around the Peace and Security Council, a Continental Early Warning System, and the long-planned African Standby Force. More than two decades after this architecture was conceived, its component parts remain unevenly developed: the Peace and Security Council convenes regularly and has built a credible normative record on issues such as unconstitutional changes of government, but the Standby Force has never been operationally deployed at scale, and early warning capacity varies considerably between regional economic communities.
This unevenness matters because the doctrine of African ownership has always rested on two distinct claims that are not always compatible. The first is a claim about legitimacy: African mediators, drawing on shared regional history, language, and political networks, can engage parties to a conflict in ways that distant external actors cannot. The second is a claim about capability: that African institutions can deploy the financial, military, and diplomatic resources needed to make mediation stick. Recent experience suggests the legitimacy claim remains broadly intact, while the capability claim is under acute strain.
The Financing Constraint That Will Not Go Away
Nowhere is the capability gap more visible than in the financing of African Union-led peace support operations. A landmark United Nations Security Council resolution, adopted in December 2023, was designed to address this directly by permitting up to 75 percent of the cost of AU-led missions to be drawn from UN-assessed contributions, subject to Security Council authorisation on a case-by-case basis. More than two years on, the resolution has yet to be applied to a single mission: an attempt to use it to fund the African Union's stabilisation mission in Somalia failed to secure consensus amid objections from a key member of the Council, and the mission has instead faced repeated funding shortfalls that have left it unable to meet even basic operational costs in some periods. The broader financial position of United Nations peacekeeping, strained by mounting arrears from major contributors, has further narrowed the appetite of Council members to authorise new commitments. The result is a peace and security architecture that is institutionally more sophisticated than at any point in its history, yet structurally dependent on external financing arrangements that have proven difficult to operationalise even when the political will to create them exists.
Fragmentation as the New Frontier of Risk
A second driver concerns the cohesion of the regional economic communities that form the operational layer of African Union peace efforts. The withdrawal of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger from ECOWAS in January 2025, formalising a rupture that began with the Alliance of Sahel States' formation in 2023, has removed three conflict-affected states from the regional body best placed to coordinate a continental response to jihadist violence in the Sahel. The practical consequences have been significant: counter-terrorism cooperation between ECOWAS members and the Alliance states has been minimal, and armed groups including Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin have exploited the resulting coordination gaps to expand into the borderlands of Benin, Togo and northern Ghana. A serious escalation in Mali in recent weeks, involving coordinated attacks by jihadist and separatist armed groups on several major towns, has underscored how far the security situation has deteriorated even as the Alliance states have sought to build an independent regional force.
This fragmentation is not confined to the Sahel. Eastern and southern African regional bodies have likewise had to improvise new coordination mechanisms in response to the Congo crisis, merging previously separate mediation tracks run by the East African Community and the Southern African Development Community into a single panel working alongside the African Union's appointed mediator. The improvisation reflects institutional flexibility, but it has also exposed the absence of clear standing protocols for how regional bodies should divide responsibility when a conflict crosses their overlapping memberships.
When African Mediation Meets External Diplomacy
The Congo case illustrates a further complication: African-led mediation now frequently operates alongside, rather than instead of, external diplomatic tracks, and the latter have often proven more consequential. United States-brokered talks produced a peace agreement between the Congolese and Rwandan governments, while Qatari mediation produced a framework agreement between Kinshasa and the M23. Both processes proceeded in parallel with, rather than through, the African Union's own mediation structure. This is not necessarily a failure of African diplomacy: external mediators brought leverage, particularly economic and security incentives, that regional actors could not easily replicate, and African facilitators have continued to play a meaningful role in sustaining dialogue between rounds of externally brokered talks. But it does suggest that African ownership, in its purest form, is becoming harder to sustain in conflicts where global powers have direct strategic or economic interests.
A related capability gap was exposed by the Southern African Development Community's military deployment to the eastern Congo, which suffered serious losses, including the deaths of South African soldiers, after being committed without adequate air support or logistics in an active combat environment. The episode has prompted sober reassessment within the region of the conditions under which African-led military deployments can be responsibly undertaken, a question with implications well beyond the Congo.
What Continues to Work, and Why It Matters
Set against these strains, it is worth recalling what African-led approaches continue to do well. Regional facilitators bring sustained, low-profile engagement that persists between the high-visibility moments external mediators tend to favour; continental norms against unconstitutional changes of government, however imperfectly enforced, remain a meaningful point of reference that no external actor could credibly substitute; and African troop-contributing countries continue to bear the overwhelming share of the human cost of peace operations on the continent, a fact that shapes both the moral and political weight of African claims to leadership in these processes. The argument for African solutions, properly understood, is not that external involvement is illegitimate, but that durable settlements typically require local ownership of implementation long after international attention has moved elsewhere.
Considerations for Policymakers and Practitioners
For African Union institutions and regional economic communities, the priority is less new doctrine than implementation: clarifying standing protocols for coordinating overlapping regional mandates, and treating predictable financing as a precondition for credible mediation rather than a separate technical issue. For international partners, the practical question is how to support African-led processes without supplanting them, recognising that externally brokered agreements achieve little if African institutions are not equipped to monitor and sustain their implementation once the cameras leave. For regional economic communities navigating their own internal ruptures, the ECOWAS–AES experience suggests that punitive responses to unconstitutional changes of government, however justified in principle, may need to be paired with sustained engagement channels that survive the rupture, since isolation has demonstrably failed to restore either democratic governance or security cooperation in the Sahel.
Looking Ahead
Over the next six to twenty-four months, several factors will determine whether the doctrine of African ownership regains practical ground or continues to erode. The fate of the December 2023 financing resolution, due for a formal three-year review at the Security Council before the end of 2026, will be a significant signal of whether the international community is prepared to operationalise, rather than merely endorse, African-led peace operations. Implementation of the outstanding protocols in the Congo's Doha framework, covering disengagement, reintegration and the contested question of the M23's territorial withdrawal, will indicate whether African facilitators can move from a supporting to a more central role as the most acute phase of external mediation concludes. And the trajectory of the Sahel, where the Alliance of Sahel States' unified military force remains untested at scale against an expanding insurgency, will show whether security cooperation built outside existing regional architecture can succeed where ECOWAS-led approaches did not. None of these trajectories is predetermined, and analysts should be cautious of both excessive pessimism and premature claims of resolution.
Conclusion
The doctrine of African solutions to African problems is neither obsolete nor self-evidently vindicated by recent events. It remains, at minimum, a necessary aspiration: no external actor can substitute for the legitimacy that sustained local engagement provides, nor for the responsibility that African institutions and troop-contributing states already bear in practice. But the past two years have made unmistakably clear that legitimacy alone cannot compensate for unresolved financing, fragmented regional coordination, and capability gaps that leave African-led processes vulnerable to being overtaken by better-resourced external actors. Whether the principle regains practical force will depend less on its restatement at successive African Union summits than on whether the institutions built to embody it are given — and can demonstrate they can use — the resources and coherence the moment demands. That is reason enough for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to keep watching closely.
Over the past two years, two of the continent's most consequential conflicts have followed a similar arc. African-led mediation architecture established the diplomatic groundwork, only for the negotiating tracks that actually altered events on the ground to be brokered elsewhere. In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the African Union's appointed mediator and a panel of regional facilitators drawn from the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have remained engaged throughout the crisis. Still, the two agreements that have most shaped the conflict's trajectory — a peace accord between Kinshasa and Kigali and a framework agreement between the Congolese government and the M23 rebel movement — were concluded in Washington and Doha, respectively. In the Sahel, the rupture between the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the breakaway Alliance of Sahel States (AES) has left West Africa's oldest regional body managing a security crisis that, by its own admission, it can no longer claim to own.
These developments invite an uncomfortable question for African institutions and their international partners alike: does the principle of "African solutions to African problems" still describe how conflicts on the continent are actually resolved, or has it become an aspiration increasingly overtaken by events? This commentary argues that the principle remains analytically sound and practically necessary, but that its credibility now depends on African institutions confronting, rather than managing around, the financing, coordination, and capability gaps that have allowed external actors to occupy the diplomatic and military space that continental architecture was designed to fill.
A Doctrine Built on Unfinished Foundations
The principle that African states should take primary responsibility for resolving conflicts on the continent is not a new aspiration. It is embedded in the African Union's founding instruments and operationalised through the African Peace and Security Architecture, the institutional framework built around the Peace and Security Council, a Continental Early Warning System, and the long-planned African Standby Force. More than two decades after this architecture was conceived, its component parts remain unevenly developed: the Peace and Security Council convenes regularly and has built a credible normative record on issues such as unconstitutional changes of government, but the Standby Force has never been operationally deployed at scale, and early warning capacity varies considerably between regional economic communities.
This unevenness matters because the doctrine of African ownership has always rested on two distinct claims that are not always compatible. The first is a claim about legitimacy: African mediators, drawing on shared regional history, language, and political networks, can engage parties to a conflict in ways that distant external actors cannot. The second is a claim about capability: that African institutions can deploy the financial, military, and diplomatic resources needed to make mediation stick. Recent experience suggests the legitimacy claim remains broadly intact, while the capability claim is under acute strain.
The Financing Constraint That Will Not Go Away
Nowhere is the capability gap more visible than in the financing of African Union-led peace support operations. A landmark United Nations Security Council resolution, adopted in December 2023, was designed to address this directly by permitting up to 75 percent of the cost of AU-led missions to be drawn from UN-assessed contributions, subject to Security Council authorisation on a case-by-case basis. More than two years on, the resolution has yet to be applied to a single mission: an attempt to use it to fund the African Union's stabilisation mission in Somalia failed to secure consensus amid objections from a key member of the Council, and the mission has instead faced repeated funding shortfalls that have left it unable to meet even basic operational costs in some periods. The broader financial position of United Nations peacekeeping, strained by mounting arrears from major contributors, has further narrowed the appetite of Council members to authorise new commitments. The result is a peace and security architecture that is institutionally more sophisticated than at any point in its history, yet structurally dependent on external financing arrangements that have proven difficult to operationalise even when the political will to create them exists.
Fragmentation as the New Frontier of Risk
A second driver concerns the cohesion of the regional economic communities that form the operational layer of African Union peace efforts. The withdrawal of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger from ECOWAS in January 2025, formalising a rupture that began with the Alliance of Sahel States' formation in 2023, has removed three conflict-affected states from the regional body best placed to coordinate a continental response to jihadist violence in the Sahel. The practical consequences have been significant: counter-terrorism cooperation between ECOWAS members and the Alliance states has been minimal, and armed groups including Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin have exploited the resulting coordination gaps to expand into the borderlands of Benin, Togo and northern Ghana. A serious escalation in Mali in recent weeks, involving coordinated attacks by jihadist and separatist armed groups on several major towns, has underscored how far the security situation has deteriorated even as the Alliance states have sought to build an independent regional force.
This fragmentation is not confined to the Sahel. Eastern and southern African regional bodies have likewise had to improvise new coordination mechanisms in response to the Congo crisis, merging previously separate mediation tracks run by the East African Community and the Southern African Development Community into a single panel working alongside the African Union's appointed mediator. The improvisation reflects institutional flexibility, but it has also exposed the absence of clear standing protocols for how regional bodies should divide responsibility when a conflict crosses their overlapping memberships.
When African Mediation Meets External Diplomacy
The Congo case illustrates a further complication: African-led mediation now frequently operates alongside, rather than instead of, external diplomatic tracks, and the latter have often proven more consequential. United States-brokered talks produced a peace agreement between the Congolese and Rwandan governments, while Qatari mediation produced a framework agreement between Kinshasa and the M23. Both processes proceeded in parallel with, rather than through, the African Union's own mediation structure. This is not necessarily a failure of African diplomacy: external mediators brought leverage, particularly economic and security incentives, that regional actors could not easily replicate, and African facilitators have continued to play a meaningful role in sustaining dialogue between rounds of externally brokered talks. But it does suggest that African ownership, in its purest form, is becoming harder to sustain in conflicts where global powers have direct strategic or economic interests.
A related capability gap was exposed by the Southern African Development Community's military deployment to the eastern Congo, which suffered serious losses, including the deaths of South African soldiers, after being committed without adequate air support or logistics in an active combat environment. The episode has prompted sober reassessment within the region of the conditions under which African-led military deployments can be responsibly undertaken, a question with implications well beyond the Congo.
What Continues to Work, and Why It Matters
Set against these strains, it is worth recalling what African-led approaches continue to do well. Regional facilitators bring sustained, low-profile engagement that persists between the high-visibility moments external mediators tend to favour; continental norms against unconstitutional changes of government, however imperfectly enforced, remain a meaningful point of reference that no external actor could credibly substitute; and African troop-contributing countries continue to bear the overwhelming share of the human cost of peace operations on the continent, a fact that shapes both the moral and political weight of African claims to leadership in these processes. The argument for African solutions, properly understood, is not that external involvement is illegitimate, but that durable settlements typically require local ownership of implementation long after international attention has moved elsewhere.
Considerations for Policymakers and Practitioners
For African Union institutions and regional economic communities, the priority is less new doctrine than implementation: clarifying standing protocols for coordinating overlapping regional mandates, and treating predictable financing as a precondition for credible mediation rather than a separate technical issue. For international partners, the practical question is how to support African-led processes without supplanting them, recognising that externally brokered agreements achieve little if African institutions are not equipped to monitor and sustain their implementation once the cameras leave. For regional economic communities navigating their own internal ruptures, the ECOWAS–AES experience suggests that punitive responses to unconstitutional changes of government, however justified in principle, may need to be paired with sustained engagement channels that survive the rupture, since isolation has demonstrably failed to restore either democratic governance or security cooperation in the Sahel.
Looking Ahead
Over the next six to twenty-four months, several factors will determine whether the doctrine of African ownership regains practical ground or continues to erode. The fate of the December 2023 financing resolution, due for a formal three-year review at the Security Council before the end of 2026, will be a significant signal of whether the international community is prepared to operationalise, rather than merely endorse, African-led peace operations. Implementation of the outstanding protocols in the Congo's Doha framework, covering disengagement, reintegration and the contested question of the M23's territorial withdrawal, will indicate whether African facilitators can move from a supporting to a more central role as the most acute phase of external mediation concludes. And the trajectory of the Sahel, where the Alliance of Sahel States' unified military force remains untested at scale against an expanding insurgency, will show whether security cooperation built outside existing regional architecture can succeed where ECOWAS-led approaches did not. None of these trajectories is predetermined, and analysts should be cautious of both excessive pessimism and premature claims of resolution.
Conclusion
The doctrine of African solutions to African problems is neither obsolete nor self-evidently vindicated by recent events. It remains, at minimum, a necessary aspiration: no external actor can substitute for the legitimacy that sustained local engagement provides, nor for the responsibility that African institutions and troop-contributing states already bear in practice. But the past two years have made unmistakably clear that legitimacy alone cannot compensate for unresolved financing, fragmented regional coordination, and capability gaps that leave African-led processes vulnerable to being overtaken by better-resourced external actors. Whether the principle regains practical force will depend less on its restatement at successive African Union summits than on whether the institutions built to embody it are given — and can demonstrate they can use — the resources and coherence the moment demands. That is reason enough for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to keep watching closely.